Sunday, February 26, 2012

We're getting toward the end of Garth Ennis's initial run on Judge Dredd--when Case Files 19 comes out, it'll only include eight of his episodes--and since that's not due out for a few months yet, this week we're veering to one of two different books that have reprinted Prog 830's "Enter Jonni Kiss." (The other one is Hamlyn's Babes in Arms, a collection of material drawn by Greg Staples; this one gets the nod for also including the otherwise unreprinted "Goodnight Kiss.")

Around 2001, Titan (which had earlier been the main source for 2000 AD book-format reprints, then gave way to Hamlyn for a few years) went back to publishing a handful of Dredd books. Ennis was already a big name by that point, thanks to the success of Preacher--which was reprinted in the Megazine--and Hitman, among other projects. So one of Titan's initiatives was reprinting the better part of Ennis's Dredd run (and some other material from around that time) in a series of uniform oversized paperbacks, including this one, arranged thematically.

What the 2001-2003 Titan books, as well as Hamlyn books before them, have going for them is that they're big, and have really nice paper and reproduction. (They tend to be relatively slim, though.) And as awesome as it is to have many more old 2000 AD stories affordably in print than ever before thanks to Rebellion's reprint program, not to mention sensibly complete packages of work--I wouldn't trade it!--there's nothing like the immersive buzz of seeing visually lush comics like these at the size at which they were intended to be read. Sean Phillips' artwork on "The Marshal," for instance, has vastly more impact here than in the Case Files book covered here a couple of weeks ago--the slathered-on brushstrokes on the backgrounds make the figures pop out. That's actually something that bugs me a bit about the new digest-sized black-and-white reprints of early Dredd stuff: it's great that there's an entry-level Cursed Earth book for people who don't want to make the long, trying trek through the first few Case Files, but it's artwork that was drawn with a certain physical dimension in mind, and losing that diminishes its (thrill-)power.

As for the contents of Goodnight Kiss itself: Arguably the only long-term subplot for which Ennis planted seeds during his Dredd run was the Marshal business, concerning a Cursed Earth tribe with a Lone Ranger fixation that's out for revenge on Mega-City One--and, as far as I know, he was the only person to follow it up. All three of the relevant stories appear here.

"Enter Jonni Kiss" is a peculiar seven-page scrap of a story, the kind of setup-without-follow-through that the Judge Dredd feature hadn't seen since PJ Maybe's first appearance in "Bug"; its only real attractions are Greg Staples doing his best Simon Bisley impression, and Ennis giving the Sovs names straight out of Asterix ("Markimarkov"? Yikes). Consider its timing, though. "Enter" appeared in Prog 830, by which point the clock was ticking for the Summer Offensive (which began with Prog 842) and the Grant Morrison/Mark Millar team's takeover of Dredd. It seems possible that "Goodnight Kiss" was supposed to be a ten-part story, and (as its title suggests) Ennis's farewell to the series.

It certainly seems to be wrapping things up in some ways. Ennis hadn't yet written a full-on Cursed Earth story (the beginning of "Judgement Day" barely counts), and that was the one big piece of Dredd world-building he hadn't gotten to play with. Dredd's hallucinations in the fourth chapter--Kraken, Giant, Dekker, Rico, Judge Death, the Dead Man--have the tone of a final-movement recapitulation (although Dekker's the only one who bit the dust on Ennis's watch). And the conclusion is one of the I-am-the-law moments Ennis occasionally permitted himself (see also "Twilight's Last Gleaming").

This was a sour note to go out on, though, a dull mood piece with distressingly heavy-handed Christian symbolism, dragged out well beyond its natural length. Jonni Kiss never gets to be anything but a badass assassin who's defeated in the end by Dredd being even more badass. (I do like that he gets his instructions on a fax machine with hole-punched paper edges.) Hoolihan is the story's resident redshirt; her death might have had some more dramatic impact if she'd been introduced before, but Ennis never really got around to adding anyone to the series' regular cast. Nick Percival's designs for the Brotherhood of Marshals look like barely reconstructed versions of the Spectre.

The form of chapter 6 is particularly odd--a 90-year flash-forward that could just as well be set a week after the events it recounts, and adds nothing to the story around it beyond "that Dredd: he sure is badass." Also, Ennis makes one of my pet-peeve writing mistakes when he has Foureyes "readin' from the Book of Revelations." In the words of Half Man Half Biscuit, "if you're going to quote from the Book of Revelation/Don't go calling it the Book of Revelations."

As it happens, the nine-part "Goodnight Kiss" didn't appear until two years after Ennis had otherwise left Dredd, and Thrill-Power Overload suggests that that's only because Nick Percival took a very long time to draw it. The scene with Chief Judge Volt at the beginning of "Goodnight Kiss" has to have been rewritten, and maybe redrawn, from one with McGruder in that role. In the meantime, Ennis's six-episode Dredd-universe spinoff "The Corps" appeared in Progs 918-923, and although it's not quite as bad as he suggests, he got so tired of it that he infamously subcontracted Si Spencer to write the final six-page episode for him.

Next week: a book so new it hasn't officially reached U.S. stores yet (although it's available in the U.K.), Judge Anderson: Psi Files vol. 2.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

We're now heading
into the final stretch of Garth Ennis's run on the weekly Dredd feature in 2000 AD--late 1992 and early 1993--and he
sure seems to have been burning out. "Innocents Abroad" is a less
inspired return visit to the characters and tone of "Emerald Isle,"
one of Ennis's unqualified successes on Dredd; "The Magic Mellow Out"
is a thuddingly heavy-handed parody of the old kids' show The Magic Roundabout; "P.J. and the Mock-Choc Factory"
is, I believe, the only P.J. Maybe story not written by John Wagner, and a weak
imitation of his earlier appearances. The one-offs this time are particularly
lame, for the most part, with cheap jokes and cheaper gross-outs. Has any
other comics writer, with the possible exception of Geoff Johns, ever been so
fond of dismemberment?

(That is, in fact, not the only Right Said Fred joke in this volume.)

Still, there are
occasional flashes of interesting writing here, mostly when Ennis is writing
something that looks more like the character-based drama for which Hellblazer was fanning his gifts at the
time than like an attempt to be funny or to channel Wagner. Sometimes,
returning to an idea from a Wagner episode gave him an excuse to do his own
kind of story, as with "Unwelcome Guests," Ennis's second callback to
"The Interrogation," with the return of the Random Physical Abuse
test. (Incidentally, Judge De Gaulle from "The Interrogation" would
make her final appearance only a few months later--but we'll get to that in due
time.) And sometimes having more than six pages and a punch line to take care
of let him open characters up a little. "Raider" is a pro forma
Judge-gone-bad-for-love story with one great moment: the undercover seductress
waiting until the entrapped man has walked away, then closing her eyes and
whispering "worry about yourself." That's the side of Ennis that gets
me every time.

Even the better
artists on these weekly episodes, though, seem to be getting it over with.
Brett Ewins' "Last Night Out" is one of the stiffest things I've ever
seen from him. Besides his evergreen cover for the "Unwelcome Guests" issue, above, the long-absent Ron Smith returns to phone in "A, B or C
Warrior" (to be fair, the script doesn't give him anything particularly
funny to draw). Greg Staples' investment in "Blind Mate" seems to
have extended as far as coming up with a bucktoothed caricature of Cilla Black
and drawing it over and over, interspersed with generic grim head shots of
Dredd.

The final 2000 AD episode reprinted here is a
plotless throwaway, "Happy Birthday Judge Dredd." It's notable as the
first weekly episode written by Mark Millar, whose relatively brief tenure as
Dredd's more-or-less regular writer would begin a few months later (following a
ramp-up that included his own "Purgatory" serial, which launched in
Prog 834, and the infamous Summer Offensive period)--not to mention the first
weekly episode written by somebody other than Grant, Wagner or Ennis in well
over ten years. Since it ran in the April 3, 1993 issue, the birthday here wasn't
quite 2000 AD's sixteenth birthday,
though (Prog 1 was dated Feb. 26, 1977, meaning it would've gone on sale 35
years ago today: happy birthday, 2000 AD,
by the way!), or the sixteenth birthday of the feature--that would have been on
the anniversary of Prog 2.

(That does
raise the surprisingly answerable question of how old, exactly, Joe Dredd is.
The timeline of his stories is fixed at 122 years in the future, so when we
first see him, it's the year 2099. Per "Mutie the Pig," he was born
in 2066. Per "A Case for Treatment" and "Origins," he's a
clone who was artificially aged very quickly and "born" at the physical age of five, then presumably plopped directly into the Academy of Law. He
and Rico graduated from the Academy in 2079--two years early, since most cadets
graduate at the age of twenty, but early graduation is not unheard of. Rico
would have had to have gotten caught and sentenced to Titan very soon after
making full eagle for him to get back in time for "The Return of
Rico," although Pat Mills' rewrite of that story as "Flashback
2099" attempts to retcon it to happen after
"The Day the Law Died," so presumably it should've actually been
called "Flashback 2101." In any case, on--let's say, April 3,
2134--it'll be 68 years from Joe's official birthday, although he's physically
73.)

The Megazine had it a little better during
this period, largely thanks to the first two "Mechanismo" serials. I'll
be covering them in greater depth in a bit over a month, but it's interesting
that for all the kinds of Dredd stories John Wagner had written, he'd never done
an extended straight-up action piece of this kind before. It's essentially
one long chase-and-shoot sequence, with an intermission in the middle. (As the
first episode of "Mechanismo Returns" indicates, the eleven episodes
reprinted here happen in the space of a single day.) Compare it to, for
instance, the dense, talky "Day of Chaos"--and I should note that I love how dense and talky it is--and you
get a sense of yet another way in which Wagner's range is broad.

The
intermission's not quite as much fun, aside from John Hicklenton's
characteristically berserk art on Alan Grant's uncharacteristically berserk
story "Resyk Man." Two of the four episodes between the first and
second "Mechanismo" stories are the first Dredd work by Xuasus,
a.k.a. Spanish artist Juan Jesus Garcia, who has the monumentally annoying
habit of signing as many pages of his work as he can. On the other hand, given
that this volume once again doesn't identify who wrote and drew which Megazine episodes, maybe he was onto
something.

For the record:
other Dreddverse serials that were published during this era of the Megazine but haven't yet been collected
in book form include Alan Grant and Carlos Ezquerra's "Armageddon: The Bad
Man" (a creator-owned project that was supposed to eventually dovetail
with the history of Mega-City One, but never got that far), David Bishop, Dave
Stone and Shaky Kane's "Soul Sisters," several Dave Stone/Charlie
Adlard "Armitage" stories, a couple of Jim Alexander/John Ridgway
"Calhab Justice" stories, various "Judge Hershey" stories,
and Garth Ennis and Nick Percival's "Sleeze 'n' Ryder."

Case Files 18 is the final volume of the complete chronological Judge Dredd reprints published to date, meaning that the earliest never-reprinted episodes (aside from the contentious bits of "The Cursed Earth") are currently Prog 831's "Judge Who Lives Downstairs" and Meg 2.27-29's "The Jigsaw Murders." We're apparently due to get
volumes 19 and 20, as well as Restricted
Files 4, later this year; those should take us through "Inferno"
and "Book of the Dead," at least, and perhaps up to the doorstep of
"Wilderlands." Next week, though, thanks to this blog's
"every book containing an episode we haven't covered yet, in those
episodes' chronological order of first publication" strategy, we get the
Titan treatment for the first time, with Goodnight
Kiss, featuring Ennis's Jonni Kiss stories. The facial surgery will
be happening this week, I suppose.

GRAEME: It's possible that the entire concept of "You Can Never Go Home
Again" was created because someone had realized that, at some point in the
future, I would re-read these very "Devlin Waugh" comics and think
"THIS is what I loved so much twenty years ago? What was I thinking?"
I think that, in whatever part of my comics-addled memory I was storing these
stories, I'd managed to blank out how formulaic they actually were, and how
maddeningly and frustratingly odd the pacing could be. Reading them back now,
more than once I found myself reminded of Mark Millar - not the Millar of
"Red Razors," thankfully, but his more famous work, especially
Marvel's Civil War - with his habit
of trans-Atlantic expeditionary dialogue and sacrificing dramatic tension for a
punchline at the most inopportune of times. "Devlin Waugh" is
arguably the most mainstream that writer John Smith ever got, and his other
work of this period ("Indigo Prime," "Firekind,"
"Revere," etc.) from 2000 AD
has aged far better than this, but nonetheless, I ended this book trying to
work out if calling him "The Queer Mark Millar" was an insult or not.

That said, when
Smith can rein in the temptation to have Devlin dive towards whatever camp bon
mot is on offer, there's a lot to like in this collection; for all the
supernatural elements, Devlin makes sense as a Dredd character because of his
humor, whether it's the pun in his name or his job, which seems to fit into the
Dredd formula of "Take something in today's world but push it to an
unexpected extreme." (It's the Vatican - but they employ freelance monster
hunters! There's a high-concept sheen to it that you can imagine Wagner and
Grant coming up with for a one-off episode somewhere in their 1980s heyday,
don't you think?) That the character comes off so often as two-dimensional also
works in his favor, for me at least, weirdly; my favorite 2000 AD characters aren't so much fully-fleshed out characters as
much as shorthand stand-ins that can be dropped into stories without much
explanation in five-page installments, with everything else coming from there,
and from that point of view, Devlin is completely covered.

But the stories…!
Both of the lengthy stories in this collection ("Swimming In Blood"
and "Fetish") fall apart at the end, as Smith seems to realize that
he's become far too enamored with setting the stage and creating atmospheric
scenes of foreboding, at the cost of really coming up with a plot machine that
can deliver anything remotely approaching a satisfying conclusion, and so the
climaxes seem messy, rushed and, in "Fetish"'s case, somewhat
nonsensical. (Seriously, I know it's a Dredd story and all, but to see the
story devolve into "I can PUNCH THIS PROBLEM AWAY" is just
unfortunate.) But to complain about that feels like it's missing the appeal of
Smith's writing, which has always seems to be more about the language and the
ideas during the journey, as opposed to the actual plot of the story being
told.

Something else
"Fetish" fails at: Having artwork that is clear enough to decipher. I
remember the joke from this era of British comics that Simon Bisley's legacy
would be to teach artists how to create muddy artwork too dark to print
properly, and Siku's paintings in this story completely prove that point…
Possibly the originals looked spectacular, but on the printed page, they're
just a mess. But maybe it's the printers' fault; Sean Philips' work on "Swimming
in Blood" also seems curiously darker and less clear than I remember it.

I have to admit, I
came away from this book liking Devlin as a character, and liking the idea of
the stories more than the stories themselves… Is that just me?

DOUGLAS:
No, I think that's a fair assessment. What's interesting to me is that
"Swimming in Blood" was hugely popular when it first appeared--as I
understand, the readers' poll picked Devlin Waugh as the readers' favorite
character (over Dredd, the only time that's happened). And he really is a great
invention: "Noel Coward as played by Arnold Schwarzenegger," as John
Smith put it in his initial proposal. (As for that cover below: "Thrills! Pills! Chills!" Wasn't that a Howard Chaykin joke from American Flagg!?)

Actually, can you please explain Smith to me a bit
more? He's been described to me as "the one great 2000 AD writer who never caught on in America" (and his
American work consists of one issue of Hellblazer,
a Scarab miniseries, a bunch of
issues of Vampirella of all things, and
not much else besides). He's not much of a public figure; I've seen a couple of
brief interviews with him, and that's it. He mentions in passing in Thrill-Power Overload that he's disabled.
His work seems to come in bursts. "Indigo Prime," which you've
mentioned is one of your favorite things of his, appeared in a set of stories
between 1989 and 1991, then all but totally disappeared until this year. He
wrote a pretty impressive horror serial in 2000
AD called "Cradlegrave" that just got collected a few months ago.

I do not get
him. And it's not like I dislike
his writing--I like it a lot sometimes, especially "Cradlegrave" and
the recent "Indigo Prime" material--but I get the strong sense that
there's something interesting in there that I'm missing. What would you say is
distinctive about Smith's sensibility, or key to understanding what he's up to?

GRAEME: I'm very tempted to say that being a John Smith
fan is a somewhat masochistic enterprise; he's definitely more in the Grant
Morrison/Peter Milligan mold than a more traditional John Wagner/Alan Grant/Pat
Mills style, with influences leaning more towards the esoteric than the
meat-and-potatoes mainstream of 2000 AD
writers from days of yore, but as cruel as it sounds, I think what really
distinguishes him from other writers is his tendency to get lost within his own
stories. The Scarab series he did for
Vertigo is a great example of this; he throws up lots of potentially
interesting ideas and possibilities in the first few issues, but instead of
developing them, he goes off and finds some more, and then some more, and seems
surprised when the series nears its ending leading to a deus ex machina-esque
final issue.

To like Smith's work
is to be able to be more interested in the ideas and ingredients in a story
than the story itself, at least from a plot standpoint; to like his use of
language, or the suggestion of some concept enough that you can extrapolate and
fill in the blanks - because there will be a lot of blanks - and not get that
bothered when you don't get anything resembling a satisfying conclusion to
whatever conflict you've become so caught up in. (This may be entirely unfair
to his more recent stuff; I haven't read "Cradlegrave," and haven't
finished his more recent "Indigo Prime" series yet, so for all I
know, he's gotten that under control in recent years.)

Ultimately, I think
Smith's lack of focus - whether it's maintaining his own, or bringing his
stories into focus - is his selling point as well as his drawback. Those
readers who always feel that the complaint that Grant Morrison's stories read
like he's on drugs is unfair because that would make them more scattered,
interesting or wilder would be well served by Smith, I think, but those for
whom Morrison or Milligan is too outré... best stay away.

Almost all of
Smith's best work - or maybe his most important - is out of print now, sadly. New Statesmen, his attempt to create a
post-Watchmen superhero political thriller based in a future America, saw early
work from Duncan Fegredo and Sean Phillips, and is another noble,
fatally-flawed, series worth reconsidering, and "Straitgate," his
coming-out body horror series, again with Phillips (check out the Dave McKean-"influenced" title page here--ah, 1990...), is one of those wonderful,
lost classics of British comics. Thinking about it now, it strikes me that
Smith really specialized in body horror. Maybe something to do with his only
having one arm...? Hmm.

DOUGLAS: As far as the reproduction of artwork in Swimming in Blood goes, I have a copy of
Megazine #2.01 to compare it to, and
the artwork's actually a bit lighter
in the DC/2000 AD trade edition. But the reprint is also significantly smaller,
and the full-bleed page layouts that Sean Phillips used a lot get white borders
around them, which makes them smaller still. (On top of that, there's a bit of
a moiré effect in the reprint--Phillips' paint textures are much clearer in the
Megazine version.)

And, in fact, the final page of that first episode
is a bit different in the reprint. The first word balloon of the original page, as above, has Waugh simply saying "You can all
breathe a sigh of relief, gentlemen.
Fingers off the triggers..." In
the DC edition, that becomes "Fingers off
the triggers, sphincters
unclenched..." That's the way Smith wrote the line, and he was apparently
annoyed that it had been censored; editor David Bishop later claimed that
"I cut the part about 'sphincters' purely due to my own ignorance - I'd
never done biology and hadn't a clue what a sphincter was!"

As
Bishop's text feature in Judge Dredd
Megazine #201 explains, "Devlin Waugh" seemed a bit cursed for a
while as a series. The second significant Devlin Waugh storyline,
"Fetish," was originally going to be seven episodes of 17 pages
apiece (and had been proposed as a Dredd story involving "Judge
Tarzan"--who became Shaka--and didn't initially have Devlin in it at all).
Ashley Wood was going to draw it, sat on it for a year, completed five pages in
painted color, scrapped that, redrew four of them in black and white, then gave
up.

Company policy at the time was that any work paid
for had to be published, so Bishop wrote a new script (as "Johnny
Mondo") for those nine pages--four of which were essentially duplicates of
others--and published it as a Judge Karyn story called "Visions" in Megazine #3.08, which served as a teaser
for "Fetish." (A page from that version appears above, speaking of Dave McKean-influenced work...) Then he cut Smith's script for "Fetish" down
to five episodes and turned it over to artist Siku, who'd drawn the Pan-African Judges strip, among other things. By the time it finally
started appearing, it had been four and a half years since "Swimming in
Blood" had finished its run. ("A Mouthful of Dust"--drawn by
Michael Gaydos of Alias,
surprisingly--took nearly two years to appear after that, and when it did, the
first episode was apparently printed in scrambled order. Cursed!) And yes,
"Fetish" is a mess--as a story it's baffling and rambling, and Siku's
art has a lot of beautiful textures and colors and a near-total absence of
narrative clarity.

Here's another question for you, Graeme: what do
you make of the two prose stories at the back of this volume? More broadly, can
you explain what the deal is with prose stories about comics characters in
British annuals and such? 2000 AD
seems to have had a lot of them over the years--there's actually a recent
e-book-only collection, Sweet Justice,
which includes a bunch of them by Neil Gaiman, Peter Milligan, Mark Millar and
others. How did that particular tradition evolve?

GRAEME: This is where my memory may be completely
betraying me, but I seem to remember that the tradition of text stories in 2000 AD annuals and specials comes from
a corporate policy from IPC that said annuals and specials had to have a particular
number of pages devoted to non-comic strip material; there was also a
restriction on the amount of all-new comic material allowed in each of these
non-regular editions, which led to the earliest 2000 AD (and later, Judge
Dredd) annuals having some really unusual reprint material, some of which
hadn't even appeared in 2000 AD to
begin with. Definitely the first 2000 AD
annuals had non-fiction text pieces that were definitely non-scrotnig, so I
wouldn't be surprised if the idea of replacing them with prose stories came
about as a way of toeing the corporate line while not diluting the 2000 AD brand. (It's not just 2000 AD that did this; Marvel UK had a
history of prose stories, as well. I think the first Grant Morrison story I
ever read was a text story from the old Captain Britain monthly comic.)

Smith was amongst
the strongest of the 2000 AD writers
who handled the prose stories, although I'm not sure that's necessarily on
display in the two stories that end this collection; both of these seem written
in a particular style that's more traditional than the one he used when handled
"Indigo Prime" or "Tyranny Rex" prose stories elsewhere in 2000 AD history, but I wonder if that's
an attempt to stay within the tradition of Devlin's literary ancestors more than
anything else. I like these stories, though; maybe more than the comic material
in the collection, because they're not fighting with unclear visuals for
attention, and also because - being so short - they allow Smith to meander and
not feel compelled to fit within some idea of Thrill-Powered Epic. They feel
closer to "pure" Devlin, if that makes sense. But what did you make
of them?

DOUGLAS:
I enjoyed both of them, although they also succumb to the tendency to keep
throwing ideas out until it's time for the story to be over--the big surprise
at the end of "A Love Like Blood" is that, gasp, Devlin's stalker is
a girl! (Come to think of it, both
prose stories are basically about stalkers.) And as frustrating as everything in this book can be at times, I keep running across elements of
Smith's stories that I really like--a clever idea, a well-turned bit of prose--and
his jokes are usually pretty funny. Has he ever written a straight-up comedy? I
grinned at the bit about "munce Thermidor," and at the
throat-clearing innuendo of the conversation between Devlin and Chigley:
"'Are you, by any chance, a demon yourself?' There. Coming right out with
it."

Speaking of throat-clearing innuendo: both of
these stories go a bit further with the "GUESS WHAT? HE'S GAY!!!"
stuff than I suspect Smith would've gotten away with in the context of comics.
(Another terrific line from "A Love Like Blood": "They'd become
friends under the pier, water round their knees, listening to the creak and
groan of moored yachts.") 1992 really was the optimal moment for a character
like Devlin--I can't imagine it'd have been possible for mainstream comics to
feature a really flamboyantly gay
main character much earlier (Extraño had come along four years earlier, but he
wasn't really the type who could carry his own feature), or for a protagonist
that flamboyant not to be a questionable stereotype by a few years later.

I don't really find that Smith sacrifices dramatic
tension for punch lines--part of what's so much fun about Devlin as a character
is that he not only refuses to take anything seriously, but delights in
annoying anyone around him who does
take things seriously. Any time he's in the same space as Dredd, especially in
"Brief Encounter," he gets to play Groucho to Dredd's Margaret
Dumont. I also admire the fact that Smith's willing to kick the status quo of
his projects, hard. Turning Devlin into a vampire at the end of "Swimming
in Blood" probably weighed down the concept of the series with one more
element than it needed, but it also signaled that this was not going to be a
project like Dredd where the premise can't really change at all.

I will say, though, that I think a lot of what makes
"Swimming in Blood" work is Sean Phillips' artwork. He varies the
look and style of his artwork just enough to underscore the tone of one
sequence after another: watercolors for the establishing shots of the Bahamas,
Münch-ish gobs and smears of paint for the sequences we see from the vampires'
perspective, the checkerboard floor tiles that ground the sequences in the
morgue and make it look even more prison-like, the blue-green glow of
light-through-water that comes through Aquatraz's windows. I particularly like
the way he draws Devlin's face in profile whenever possible, or puts him in
muscle-mag poses, even when that's totally incongruous with what everybody else
in the image is doing.

That's actually one of the problems with Siku's
art that sinks "Fetish," beyond the dark-and-muddy issue: he paints
every sequence exactly the same way, and uses every layout trick he can find to
avoid giving us a clear look at any character's face or body most of the time,
maybe because he knows actual figure drawing and face acting is his weak point.
Compare the end-of-chapter Devlin-arrives image above from "Swimming in
Blood," and the one below from the third chapter of "Fetish."
They're very similar images in pose and composition (down to the big circle in
the background!), but the Phillips painting gets enormous mileage out of
subtleties of his expression and outfit and pose, while Siku's gives us almost
no fresh information other than the gag of Devlin's teeny little parasol.

So maybe if I can ask you to cast your mind back a
bit to when these stories first came out: what did you make of them (and of
Smith, and of Devlin as a character) at the time? What was so striking about
them then?

GRAEME: I seem to remember that Smith was very much on
my radar at the time this series first appeared; definitely "New
Statesmen," "Tyranny Rex" and "Indigo Prime" had
appeared, as well as the first book of "Revere" (a short,
mostly-forgotten 2000 AD series that may be my favorite Smith thing of all). I
remember very clearly that Devlin was by far my favorite Megazine strip, and the one that kept me buying the series - I
dropped it not long after "Swimming in Blood" was finished, and then
came back to it when the character reappeared for the one-off meeting much,
much later. What stood out for me was Smith's ability to create a particularly
un-Dredd-like atmosphere. "Swimming in Blood" lacks the safeness that
Dredd has, if that's not an odd thing to say; part of the essential Dredd tone,
I think, is a comedy and humor that makes even the most gruesome event somehow
"okay" for the reader, but Smith's work in general is much more
freewheeling and evocative and filled with dread. (Part of the reason that
something like "America" has such impact, I'd argue, is that it knows
when to pull back on the comedy.) "Devlin Waugh" is the first time
that he manages to successfully marry that to a more familiar, 2000 AD/Dredd-like
lead character--there's comedy in "Tyranny Rex" and "Indigo
Prime," but it's very, very different humor--but it still has a feeling of
uncertainty and danger that's very seductive.

This is, of course,
not a trick that can be sustained for a long time; once Devlin's in his fourth
or fifth series, the reader starts to realize that he's probably going to end
up okay. I get what you're saying about his becoming a vampire at the end of
"Swimming in Blood," and that's partially what I mean about the
danger and sense that "anything can happen!" But when nothing else
has really impacted or changed the character since, that story starts to take
on an origin story feeling, the creation of the status quo instead of a sign
that there IS no status quo. Re-reading these stories now, decades later, when
Devlin's made more appearances since, the feeling of uncertainty seems quaint
and almost unreal in retrospect. He becomes a vampire because that's the final
twist in his high concept, not because it's Smith showing the consequences of
his horror story adventure.

*****

Thanks again, Graeme! Next week: it's time to
polish off the extant Complete Case Files
with volume 18, featuring the first two "Mechanismo"
storylines--although there will apparently be at least a couple more Case Files volumes coming before this
blog runs out of books to cover weekly.

JOE: If you'll allow it, I'd like to begin our
Sunday celebrations with a video clip. Unorthodox, I know, but I can't imagine
writing anything that could possibly convey the same raw enthusiasm for the
material at hand as exhibited by its writer, Mr. Garth Ennis himself:

A scrotnig
moment indeed to see the man behind Preacher
transformed into Chris Ware before your very eyes! And they didn't catch him on
a bad day or anything; probably the funniest recurring bit in David Bishop's Thrill-Power Overload is Ennis'
intermittent commentary on his own writing for 2000 AD, which is so completely and utterly negative (sample: "I
think if you examine it in detail you'll find it was, in fact, crap,")
that by the end you start coughing up a Pavlovian chuckle as soon as Ennis'
name appears. You wonder if maybe he isn't trying to wind Bishop up a little.

Yet there's an
uncomfortable aspect to all of this: he's basically right. Ennis scripts six of
the seven stories collected in this book, and none of them are very good. I'm
probably in the majority in saying that my favorite Ennis Dredd pieces -- and I
haven't read all of them, mind you -- are the conversational or declaratory
character things, like the Muzak Killer stories where it's nothing but 21,
22-year old Garth Ennis railing about music while Dermot Power lays down
photorealist images of Sinéad O'Connor being shot in the head. There you get
some sense of an angry young man's unrefined energy, which is often something
that gets smothered under the expectations of work-for-hire production on a
superhero property you haven't created.

And yes, for
the purposes of this Feast of Ennis, I'm counting Judge Dredd as a
work-for-hire superhero property, because structurally -- insofar as Ennis is
tasked with following a 'core' characterization established by a prior, popular
writer (actually the co-creator, fine Pennsylvania native John Wagner, in this
case), with the weight of longstanding fan expectations and content
restrictions hanging over him -- that's exactly what it is. The irony, then, is
obvious: because Ennis is unique among writers of North American comic
book-type comics in avoiding work-for-hire superhero production as much as
possible -- and, when so moved, infusing preexisting superhero properties with
an extremely distinct point of view, well beyond the unique writerly voices of
your Grant Morrisons or Mark Millars, since those writers can blend their
perspectives into the overriding idea of the ongoing superhero 'universe,'
while Ennis, with only Warren Ellis even approaching him on that front, can
only ever write Garth Ennis Comics -- the prospect of seeing him absorbed fully
into such an environment so early in his career can only make the stuff
intriguing to devout readers, no matter how weak the comics themselves are.

I concede, of
course, that there's other elements at play, and that there's a keen difference
between structural and substantive work-for-hire superhero comics. Morrison and
Millar have unmistakable writerly voices, but they also claim a great personal
affection for U.S. superhero comics and their particular traits. Ennis has no
such thing, so he might simply be less willing to sink himself into the
substance of capes 'n tights American superheroes, even when the evident
financial benefits of working on such comics inspire his participation. In
contrast, Ennis is on the record many times as having a great, nostalgic
affection for Dredd and 2000 AD,
rough and violent and nasty-thrilling childhood favorites, so it could be that
a writer who started out, we must remember, writing what now would be termed 'literary
comics' via Troubled Souls at Crisis, became willingly swallowed by
the substance of Dredd without having the experience to maintain interesting or
effective storytelling.

An example from
Case Files 17 will probably help. The
absolute worst thing in the book is "A Magic Place," illustrated in
different chapters by Steve Dillon and Simon Coleby, both working in collaboration
with the mysterious "Hart," whom I will presume is colorist Gina
Hart, sadly uncredited anywhere else in the book (which, furthermore, due to
the formatting of the included issues of Judge
Dredd Megazine, neglects to specify which artists exactly worked on those
stories, and actually omits the title of one of those stories altogether; not a
bug-free project yet, I'm afraid). It is a quintessential Bad Superhero Comic,
and not just because of the fill-in art. No, this is a creature of continuity,
a direct follow-up to "Beyond the Wall," one of Dillon's stories from
the 2000 AD Sci-Fi Special 1986
(written by Wagner & Alan Grant, reprinted in The Restricted Files 2), seeing a pair of star-crossed lover
characters frolicking in a peaceable agrarian setting five years later. Then an
evil supervillain in a chef's costume invades their space wielding a deadly
blender and subjects them to PG-13-rated terror until the boy half of the
equation gets himself shot while warning the Judges about the threat, after
which Dredd kills the bad people and the boy dies clutching a rose -- HIS LOVER
IS NAMED "ROSIE" YOU SEE -- having cleared villainous landmines from
the beloved garden that symbolizes the promise of life and peace and love and
etc.

The problem is,
the extraordinary sentimentality of this scenario is totally devoid of actual
emotional effect unless you've read the original story; like an American
superhero writer leaning hard on our memories of past adventures in scratching
the outline of an emotional arc and calling it a proper story, Ennis has his
doomed protagonist narrate his emotional history with this woman via captions
and flatly state the metaphor behind concrete blocks vs. organic settings in
expository dialogue -- your review of the Restricted Files 2 suggests that a
b&w vs. color effect is used in the original, which sounds better -- before
everything goes to hell in a purportedly scalding a heartbreaking manner. Which
leads us to problem #2: the man taking everything to hell is a dude in chef's
hat swinging a deadly blender, which would have seemed Dredd-apropos yet
entirely ridiculous in a would-be shattering human story even if Ennis wasn't
further held back by content restrictions leaving the home invasion element
seeming like a 10:00 PM network television edit of Fight for Your Life. Although query, I guess, whether this is
nominally better or worse than a guy with a fin on his head raping women in Justice League crossovers.

What makes
this story bad isn't just Ennis' inexperience, then, but his inability to parse
his affection for Dredd tropes -- and the necessity for him to deal with those
tropes in terms of fan/editorial expectations -- so that they don't sabotage
the story he's trying to tell. A few weeks ago you stated that "Wagner's version of Dredd is a
useful monster; Ennis's is tough enough to do hard things," suggesting
that the young Ennis' love for the character blinded him, in a fannish way,
from the deeper implications of the concept. I both agree and disagree, insofar
as I think Ennis does absolutely understand that Dredd is a monster -- far and
away the best part of "A Magic Place" is two panels segueing from the
evil chef walloping the boy to Dredd crunching a young perp's balls, though
Ennis then gilds the lily by pointing out his own cleverness via caption -- but
he's also hesitant to actually explore the character in a way that might upset
Wagner's baseline, which we might even qualify as a matter of respecting
creator's rights, should we agree that characters ought really never be written
by anyone other than the creators, although that kind of approach is obviously
anathematic to American superhero comics along with most of 2000 AD's history, and indeed would have
squelched the whole British Invasion thing from the start, to say nothing of
the Hellblazer comics Ennis was
already writing at this time, where he truly began to cast off the burden of
fidelity and make Garth Ennis Comics.

DOUGLAS:
I'd agree that Ennis was having a very hard time channeling his fondness for
the Wagner incarnation into stories that felt like Garth Ennis Comics;
sometimes his Dredd crossed the line into something close to John Wagner fan-fiction,
and never more than the end of "Judgement Day," with the two big
Wagner/Carlos Ezquerra characters--now, at least for a while, Ennis/Ezquerra
characters--stomping off into the dust, growling "who the hell's gonna
mess with us?" Dredd and Stront
sure are awesome, all right! (It's weird how hard it is to get out from Wagner's
shadow on Dredd. I'll be getting around to Grant Morrison and Ezquerra's "Inferno"
when Case Files 19 comes out a bit
later this year, but I recently read it for the first time, and was alarmed to
see Morrison, of all writers, losing his "unmistakable writerly voice"
almost completely in trying to play back old Wagner beats louder.) Eight years
after his main run ended, Ennis returned to Dredd for "Helter Skelter,"
which is probably stronger for acknowledging outright that it's 2000 AD fanfic. (He talks in this brief interview about "the memory of reading it weekly as a kid and somehow always feeling just a little bit happier afterwards.")

I don't love "A Magic Place" either, but
my suspicion--unconfirmed by anything I've read, just circumstantial
evidence--is that it was a last-second fill-in to mark time before "Judgement
Day" began. After twenty monthly issues, Judge Dredd: The Megazine was relaunched in May 1992 as a biweekly,
with a lower page count (44) and a lower cover price (99p). Wagner hadn't
published a Dredd story proper in six months or so at that point, but returned
to write the flagship feature in the first issue--"Texas City Sting,"
a fluffy little collaboration with an artist who'd never drawn Dredd before, Yan
Shimony (with Gina Hart again coloring).

That makes no sense for a big relaunch, and when
an artist as fast as Steve Dillon only draws the first part of a three-part
story, I have to suspect that there's a real time-crunch issue. It seems
possible, anyway, that "Judgement Day" was meant to start six weeks
earlier, to be part of the first issue of the relaunched Megazine, but that when it hit schedule problems it was bumped
back, with the evergreen "Almighty Dredd" and the hastily whisked
together "Texas City Sting" and "A Magic Place" vamping
until it was ready. (It may also have been pointed out that Dredd himself
barely even appears in the first Megazine
chapter of "Judgement Day.")

In any case, the second Megazine issue's text pages include a couple of surprises. They
explain the shape of "Judgement Day," and note that Dean Ormston will
be painting most of the Megazine
episodes but that "rising new star" Chris Halls will paint one--Jog,
I think you get to tell a bit more about Halls! And they include what I suspect
is the first appearance of Judge Pal, a bit of business that's more recently
become a favorite subplot of current Dredd-writer-when-Wagner's-not-around Al
Ewing, who also recently took over from Ennis on his co-creation Jennifer
Blood. (Anyone know if Pal turned up anywhere before this?)

JOE: Ha, I actually do have an earlier Judge Pal
appearance! For a little while, Fleetway was putting out these 48-page
'Prestige Format' editions of the Megazine
for the U.S. market; issue #2 arrived at some undisclosed moment in mid-to-late
1991 (so, close to a year after the U.K. edition), and what did we get on the
inside front cover?

DOUGLAS: Jesus. You really have read
every comic ever.

But yes, "Judgement Day" occupies a
solid half of this volume, and I think it exemplifies what didn't work about
the Ennis era. It's a relatively huge story, the first of the three big
crossovers between 2000 AD and the Megazine--20 chapters, drawn by four
artists. The first page credits Wagner for co-plotting it with Ennis, who's
said that Wagner's contribution really only consisted of suggesting that
another big epic would be a good idea and that zombies seemed to be pretty hot
at the time.

It's thoughtful of Ennis to take the blame for it,
anyway. As he's noted, it's basically his attempt to rewrite "The
Apocalypse War," and he recycles bits of that era's Dredd stories all over
it: the bang-and-they're-gone deaths of Dekker and Perrier are Giant's death,
the singing-and-dancing zombies recapitulate the guy singing while the bombs
fall on the southern sectors, the fight at the wall is the Dan Tanna Junction
sequence--when somebody tells Dredd that "the gun barrels are overheating,"
I'm amazed Ennis doesn't follow it with the exploding-guns routine again.
Sabbat is essentially Judge Death with much worse character design (and no
motivation for wanting to kill everyone other than that he's very bad, and comedy-relief
trappings from his first appearance). And, of course, Ennis tries to top the "nuking
East-Meg One" sequence from "The Apocalypse War" with the one
where Dredd orders five cities nuked.

So I'd agree that this is a bad superhero comic,
and I think one crucial aspect of its badness was slightly ahead of its time: "remember
that thing you loved? Here it is again!" This is one of the few times that
"Judge Dredd" has directly appealed to its readers' memories of what the series used to be like, as opposed
to returning to some previously established plot point or character (as in "A
Magic Place"). You start doing that shit and you end up with a "classic
era," and before you know it you're Teen
Titans, sitting on a street corner with a facial tattoo of the splash page
of "Who Is Donna Troy?"

In particular, the kill-'em-all moment in
"Judgement Day" doesn't have anything like the same impact as its
model, partly because Wagner pulled that trick already, and mostly because it's
presented as not being particularly monstrous. Destroying East-Meg One was an
atrocity of war, and a potentially unjustified act of rage--a moment where as
readers we're set up to cheer and also be horrified that we're cheering. What
Ennis's Dredd does here, though, is presented as unfortunate but necessary, and
anyway almost everyone in those cities is dead already so it's not that big a
deal, right?, and it's a good thing there was somebody tough enough to make
that hard call. It's also had very little in the way of long-term consequences,
while Dredd's hand in the genocide of East-Meg One has reverberated for
decades.

That's another strength of Wagner's (and Grant's)
that Ennis lacked at this point: long-term planning. "The Apocalypse
War" and "Necropolis," and to some extent "Oz," had
gradual ramp-ups to their beginnings, and shifted the course of the series
after they ended. "Judgement Day" all but begins "one day, Judge
Dredd and some cadets were out on a hotdog run..." And once it ends--our
hero decapitates the bad guy and sticks his head on a plot device, and the
global threat abruptly stops--that's all but it: how about those zombies, huh?
(There are a few references to "Judgement Day" in subsequent stories,
but Ennis's only real attempt to deal with it as having long-term consequences
was a six-page epilogue, "The Kinda Dead Man," that appeared a few
months later and serves as a postscript in the DC edition of Judgement Day.) All of those long
stories also offer some kind of angle on the relationship between the
man-as-law and the city; this one's about Dredd and a bunch of international
judges fighting zombies.

But you touch on one of the hallmarks of Ennis's
comics: how much he likes to use familiar superhero types as spittoons, all the
way up to The Boys. "The
Marshal" is the resident superheroes-suck story here, and it's a very
strange one, despite some nice painted art by Sean Phillips in his "my
brushstrokes, let me show you them" mode. The murderous antagonist who
goes around bellowing about wanting justice has a cape and mask and climbs up
walls and so forth--he even keeps his mask on when he's being interrogated,
which is a good trick--and he turns out to be part of a mutant cargo cult
inspired by Tonto, as in that other engine of Dynamite Entertainment, the Lone Ranger.

There's that name, though: why call him "The
Marshal"? Might that have something to do with (heavily 2000 AD-associated) Pat Mills and Kevin
O'Neill's own superhero-kicking vehicle Marshal
Law, which had debuted a few years earlier? I have no idea--although I
think you've mentioned something about the impact Mills seems to have had on
Ennis's writing. Tell me more!

And to get back to the "Dredd the
monster" thing one more time: I wouldn't say that Ennis was blind to the
darker implications of the character, but I do think he wrote Dredd as being ultimately admirable with very little
equivocation. A lot of Ennis's favorite protagonists have been, one way or
another, straight-shooting tough guys who kill them that need killin' and die
with their boots on &c.: Jesse Custer, Tommy Monaghan, Frank Castle, and on
and on. (Part of why I like his Hellblazer
so much is that his John Constantine is more complicated than that.) His Dredd,
I think, is part of that line--excessively violent sometimes, maybe, but still
someone to whom law-abiding citizens ought to give thanks for being made of
sterner stuff than themselves. Who the hell's gonna mess with him?

JOE: Hmm, I think you’re simplifying Ennis’
attitudes toward his own characters. Or, rather, how his characters function in
his narrative schemes. Take Frank Castle, whom I feel is closest to Dredd in
general disposition, and almost acts as a successor in terms of Ennis’ body of
work - 1995’s The Punisher Kills the
Marvel Universe was Ennis’ first comic for Marvel, and it showed up just a
few months after the aptly titled "Goodnight Kiss," Ennis’ final
Dredd (and 2000 AD) contribution for
the 20th century.

Unlike with the
good Judge, however, Ennis did not appear to have any particular history with
the character, and certainly no relationship with his creators; honestly, it’s
probably a tiny klatch of dorks indeed that can name Gerry Conway (ORIGINATING
WRITER!) John Romita, Sr. (VISUAL DESIGN!) and Ross Andru (INITIAL ARTIST!) as
creators of the Punisher, going way back in his mid-’70s villain days in The Amazing Spider-Man. Castle has been
something of a malleable character since then, which probably made him an ideal
means of conveying Ennis’ mockery of American superhero substance and general
yen for funny violence, since what few continuing traits he had -- a desire for
vengeance on crime, an outsider stance toward the superhero orthodoxy, an
extensive armory -- were adaptable to Ennis’ aims, which continued through two
millennial series under the Marvel Knights imprint. Amazingly, the gap between
the two series was graced by Ennis’ return to Dredd with "Helter Skelter,"
though I’m sure the actual writing of these series couldn’t have occurred in
quite so neat a manner, nor could Ennis have possibly planned that his very
last Dredd story thus far, 2003’s "Monkey on My Back," would have
concluded the very same month that an all-new, all-different Punisher launched.

That was "Born," the first Punisher MAX series, an expanded pre-origin war story set in Vietnam;
it wasn’t clear at first, but Ennis was building a new and discreet universe
for his ‘serious’ Castle, one with no superheroes and a well-defined beginning,
middle and end. The proper Punisher MAX series launched in 2004, adopting a
very Dredd-like quasi-realtime scheme, so that the characters could age along
with their readership. This proved to be thematically apt, as it eventually
became clear that Ennis was telling a long, damning, nihilistic life’s saga, by
which Castle’s actions, though nominally satisfying in that he’s killing some
really bad people, are eventually shown to provoke future horrible acts. In
other words, he ‘wins’ from story to story, but putting the stories together
undercuts his accomplishments, sabotaging the arguable heroism of his actions. This
concept has a political dimension -- the first quasi-realtime MAX story (2004)
has government agents trying to recruit Castle for the War on Terror, while the
last one (2008) prominently links the character’s Vietnam origins to the Iraq
War, which the attentive reader gravely notes has been going on for the series’
entire run, both in and out of the comic -- but it eventually becomes integral
to Ennis’ development of the Frank Castle, who eventually admits to himself
that he could break the cycle and begin his life over again, but he can’t, he
just can’t.

In this way,
Ennis doesn’t so much equivocate as to whether Castle is a monster, but wires
that truth into the very fabric of his world, a freedom of insight he could
never have with Dredd. Yet the similarities between the characters become
especially evident in 2004’s The End one-shot, which was far from the last
Punisher comic Ennis wrote but served as terminus for his private MAX universe.
There, following a nuclear exchange at an undisclosed point in the future,
Castle eliminates the last living humans for their crimes before staggering out
into an irradiated wasteland - taking the Long Walk into the Cursed Earth. But
here the entire globe is cursed, and Castle is totally alone, because he’s
brought the Law to everyone that didn’t live up, which is to say everyone. The
series then launches itself into a dizzying meta level as Castle narrates a
vision he has of his family having their picnic in the park, hoping he’ll be
able to save them and avert his own origin. Of course, we know he’ll fail. He’s
a corporate-owned superhero character, in structure if not substance. He will
watch his family die over and over and over and over, and his life will be
ruined, ruined, ruined, because that’s what gives him value.

To live in a
superhero universe is to live in eternal, lucrative conflict. It is to live in
Hell.

It’s Ennis’
most eloquent dissent to the superhero scheme, and I feel particularly
charged-up to be recounting it on this National Before Watchmen Week.

This is why, to
my mind, Ennis’ Punisher embodies both poles of the Garth Ennis Comic - the
funny and the serious. Because when Ennis’ comics are ‘serious,’ they’re still
gruesome and violent, but they’re fundamentally about the tension between the
appeal of hard man violence -- and, on another level, the pleasure derived from
reading it -- and the understanding that such things typically act in the
service of systemic peril. This is the subtext of many of his war comics, which
sometimes pair an uncertain or passive or restrained with a harsher, less
humane counterpart in a sort of dialectic; the system of War is conductive to
inhumanity, and the struggle, then, is about resisting the system, even through
the awareness that it’s arguably in place to accomplish some greater good. And
it’s a genre system too - it’s hard for me to look at a commando comic-derived
2000 AD serial like "Invasion!" without seeing a mad Ennis anti-hero in the role
of its shotgun-wielding wild man freedom fighter. You can imagine my delight to
later discover that one of Ennis’ rejected pitches involved just that
character, recast as an unrehabilitated lunatic in a post-war world.

DOUGLAS: OK--I'm convinced by your argument! Also, I've
now gone from thinking I should maybe get around to reading more than bits and
pieces of Ennis' Punisher one of
these days to realizing that I need to. Just a few side notes on this:

There was one
other significant contributor to the Punisher's initial development, and I only
mention this because it's a great story. From Tom Spurgeon and Jordan Raphael's
Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the
American Comic Book:

Castle's
costume, a tight-fitting black suit with a large white skull on the chest,
looked fearsome enough, but the character lacked a suitable nom de guerre.
Conway and [Len] Wein, who was then editor in chief, sought Stan's counsel.

"What does
this guy do?" Stan asked.

"He's an
ex-army guy whose family was killed by the Mob. He goes out and punishes the
underworld," Wein responded.

Lee thought for
a moment. "He's the Punisher."

Wein says that
you could hear the sound of the two men slapping their foreheads--"Of course!"--at
the flawless simplicity of the name.

(Maybe that
makes Pat Mills, who came up with the name "Judge Dread" (sic) for a
series that initially looked very different, the Stan Lee figure here? I'm just
starting to get into Mills' later iteration of "Savage," in which "Invasion!"'s
shotgun-wielding wild man freedom fighter Bill Savage doesn't have quite so
much of the moral high ground above the Volgans...)

It's kind of
funny that we know now that Dredd was Wagner and Ezquerra's creation, but that
would have been even more unclear than the Punisher's background to readers in
the early years of the series. Ezquerra only drew three complete episodes
before "The Apocalypse War," almost five years in: "Bank
Raid" (the first completed story, written by Wagner and Mills, and shelved
until the 1981 Judge Dredd Annual),
"Krong," written by Malcolm Shaw, in 2000 AD #5, and the first installment of Wagner's "Robot
Wars" in #10--all, I believe, uncredited at the time.

I've only seen
the first episode of Ennis and Curse of
the Crimson Corsair artist John Higgins' three-part "Monkey
on My Back," but curiously enough it's effectively "Judge Dredd: The
Beginning"--it's set in January 2099, not long before Dredd's first
appearance in 2000 AD, and involves a
judge who's wandered into the city from the Cursed Earth.

But I
interrupted you, sorry--

JOE: "Savage" is a lot of fun; I like Patrick Goddard’s art a ton,
though I could have done without the robot stuff in the most recent one. But
then, a writer maintaining his own personal continuity can lead to trouble too.

You mentioned Mills
before - I do see a bit of him in Ennis, mainly in how Ennis enjoys pitting
damaged goods against establishment forces, and how odd moments of broad humor
burst in on the drama at unexpected moments. Marshal Law indeed seems extremely simpatico with Ennis’ take on
American superhero culture, though it’s honestly a more radical work than many
of Ennis’ series; maybe not The Punisher
MAX, but certainly The Boys,
which despite its wee slaps aimed at the stretch-pants set -- to say nothing of
the nominal and tragic-familial similarities between Bill Savage and Billy Butcher
-- is secretly one of the most old-school, Bronze Age-y superhero series on the
stands today with its looooong simmering plotlines and heavy, soap operatic
relationship drama. It’s also a hopeful work, insofar as Ennis seems intent on
leaving open the possibility for real heroism to exist in the world; Marshal Law initially reserved that
benediction for the dead, as part of its wider metaphor of superhumans as
soldiers - beneficiaries of a world Superpower. Very post-Watchmen, at least
until it went to hell all weighed down with excessive spoofing, which frankly
isn’t Ennis’ strong point either. I suspect the very fact that he sincerely doesn’t care about superheroes all that
much has denied him the background necessary to really take the piss out of the
scene effectively; all of his parodies read like a guy who knows some
Silver/Marvel Age and maybe glanced at some ‘90s stuff long enough to get a
bellyache.

(On the other hand,
the Asterix goofing in issue #38 was top notch!)

This brings us back
to "The Marshal," which is definitely my favorite piece in Case Files 17. Part of that’s because
Sean Phillips’ painting is consistent and pretty clean in conveying the
action-heavy nature of the script -- in contrast, I couldn’t even tell what was
going on at times with Greg Staples’ arguably more stylish, Hewlettesque paints
on "Babes in Arms," a soppy would-be action-story-with-a-heart
notable mainly for a magnificently dubious "Dredd is actually a
monster" moment wherein one of the story’s battered, vengeance-seeking
ex-wives peers around the corner and Our Man wallops her right in face, just
like her husband -- but it’s also due to Ennis dipping into his fascination
with Americana. He’s mentioned in interviews the powerful formative effect
westerns and cowboy iconography had on him as a child, so it feels somehow
necessary that this particular stream of interest -- at its most prominent in Preacher -- should splash into Dredd and
2000 AD. It’s also the only one of
Ennis’ stories in here that clicks with the classic Dredd subtext: a view of
America as seen by foreigners. And while Ennis surely loves America as much as
he loves Dredd, he’s more vigorous (if not much more skillful at this point) in
lodging criticism; it’s a Cowboys and Indians yarn, with the mutant Marshal
basing his life on Tonto, seeking metaphoric vengeance for the atrocities
committed on native peoples by younger Americans. The white baddie is put away,
but the outcast dies, and the Law doesn’t really give a shit. Blunt, but at
least from here you can see where Ennis is going.

(The obverse effect
can be seen in another Ennis Britcomics revival: his 2007-08 Dan Dare series with Gary Erskine, an
old-timey space opera that amounts to the most romantic, heroic, black and
white chocks away war story Ennis has ever written, yet done by that point with
enough of his career in focus so we can see an implicit criticism: that such
gallantry can only really exist in a sci-fi setting intended for children,
conveyed in a duly childlike manner.)

Of course, you can
also see where some things are going with Judgement Day; I totally, totally
agree with you that it’s a little ahead of its time in fan-flattering Greatest
Hits citation, and I’ll even go further in invoking both Tim O’Neil’s concept
of superhero momentism -- a style of writing centered around the
chase for iconic 'moments' in which the cumulative cool factor of a superhero
character is distilled into a whoop-ass pump-your-fists image or sequence that
gets the fans to their feet -- and, moreover, the unctuous faux-momentism of
supporting characters standing around and simply telling us how impossibly
fucking great the lead character inarguably is. "Judgement Day" is
lousy with all of that, even on top of the primal superhero crossover impetus:
goosing short-term sales, here with an eye toward the fortnightly returns of Judge Dredd Megazine, per David Bishop.

Still, "Judgement
Day" isn’t quite the superhero crossover at its worst, since one writer is
in charge of everything (aside from Wagner’s initial storyline tip-off), and no
other ongoing stories are interrupted. And while I agree with all of your
criticisms of the story -- Abhay Khosla once suggested that dead boring antagonists are endemic to
superhero crossovers, and by that standard Sabbat’s one for the record books --
I find the whole thing oddly sympathetic as an attempt to toss out the
ponderousness of world-shattering Event mechanics (if such notions had even
entered Ennis' mind) and just do a 150-page barrage of action scenes. But then
you get into another recurring problem with both superhero crossovers and the
stories in Case Files 17 - the art
quality varies a lot, and that's just toxic when you're trying to build mad
chains of activity on the page. So for five chapters you get Peter Doherty, who
acquits himself fairly well with a shimmery, misty painted approach that whips
up some decent creepy zombies and ugly gore, and then for five chapters (not
consecutively, mind you) you get the intermittently striking, mostly dreary
heavy shadows of Dean Ormston, who does the heavy-paints-interspersed-with-quick-sketches
Bisley thing to awkward effect, particularly when it looks like he's got
deadline doom snapping at his heels (Part 18 is a disaster). Granted, this was
early work for him. Same for Doherty. Hell, same for Staples earlier in the
book.

Definitely the same
for Chris Halls, who had debuted as a cover artist for the Megazine the month prior to his one and only chapter, and was
subsequently never seen on first-run interior comics pages again; he did,
however, provide the Mean Machine makeup effects on the beloved 1995 Judge Dredd motion picture, which
apparently caught the eye of Stanley Kubrick (whom I imagine threw his fruit
punch at the screen as soon as Stallone removed the helmet) and launched Halls
to ever-higher prominence in the cinematographic arts under his birth name of
Chris Cunningham. Yes, Come to Daddy Chris Cunningham. All is Full of Love Chris Cunningham. Frozen Chris Cunningham - I know I'll be thinking of
Judge Dredd more than usual at halftime today. But while this is all very
amusing, much like the time Paul Thomas Anderson drew comics under the name
"Stephen Platt" (NOTE: this is a lie), Cunningham's art is actually
rather fascinating in being SO green that its blend of blatant Bisley licks,
monochrome drawings, shadowplay and near-abstract, potentially computerized
images of nuclear annihilation is like witnessing an artist putting things
together in his head, somehow in front of you.

Still, the star of
both "Judgement Day" and Case
Files 17 as a whole can only be Carlos Ezquerra, rocking his very much not
green cartoon style in brazen defiance of the painterly strokes of everyone
else (though I think he actually is painting the colors). Squat in faces and
curvy in architecture, there's something about Ezquerra's look in this period
that's almost manga-like, specifically a Masamune Shirow-type Euro-informed
approach, willing to set stylized figures in a detailed, heavy, but distinctly
drawn setting, something that blends right in with the racing lines of many,
many scenes of violent activity. His art in another story, "Taking of
Sector 123," is even better:

I love it! "Sector
123" is another nothing story, a Dredd putting down a revolution
story/goths are weaklings story, but a really good artist can coax out the
fundamental emphasis on action and thereby make it seems a bit more fittingly
Dredd, and therefore a little more worthwhile. That's the backing of Dredd, the
default Thrill, but a lot of the artists in here don't have what it takes to
push it. You can't just write this stuff.

DOUGLAS: That Ezquerra page is just great, but then most of them are. This is
probably my favorite era of his art, when he got to do that supersaturated color work but
hadn't yet switched over to the too-airbrushed computer coloring of his recent
stuff. Everything about that page's composition just works. The inset images of the freaking-out 123'ers and the
cucumber-cool gunner are the same size and shape but at opposite corners of the
page; Dredd's cycle is aimed at the revolutionaries and butting into their
panel; the curve of the cycle lights' position and the bike's movement are
balanced with the Gunbird's curve and its stasis; the ship is pointed right at
the image of the gunner, as a hint that we're seeing what's happening inside
it; the few details of the buildings we can see imply a lot that we don't;
every image on the page has a different enough color scheme that the eye bounds
right from one to the next... that kind of balance of total clarity and brute
force is rare and wonderful.

Ezquerra's
also much better than anyone else in this volume at the very basic act of
indicating what's going on in any given scene, where it's happening, etc.
Doherty gives us a little glimpse of Sabbat's cloak-made-out-of-souls in the
first chapter of "Judgement Day," and Ormston knows it's there, but as soon as Ezquerra arrives
he makes sure we get a good look. I do like the "Chris Halls" chapter
a lot, though, Bisley-isms and all--that panel you pulled out for your TCJ column a few weeks ago is terrific. (An especially
nice detail: Dredd's helmet and outfit are the only areas of solid black in the
image, and the zigzag reflection in his visor is the only pure-white detail
without spraypaint speckles.)

As for
additional Halls interior art: This site claims that
there was a story called "Aliens: Matrix" by Halls and Grant Morrison (!!) that was supposed to appear in the British Aliens Magazine #23, two issues after the final one that actually
got printed. If that actually exists somewhere, I think I would not be the only
one who would be very curious to see it...

It's interesting
to think of "Judgement Day" as a superhero crossover, although I
suppose it is just in terms of having to cater to the regular readers of two
ongoing publications who probably overlap but might not (while, ideally,
attracting readers to the lower-circulation series and convincing them to stick
around). It was the first of three major crossovers between 2000 AD and the Megazine. The second was 1994's "Wilderlands"; Wagner
wrote that one with an eye to making sure readers of one series but not the
other wouldn't miss anything important happening, with the result that not very
much of import happens at all. 1999's "Doomsday Scenario," also
written by Wagner, was better planned (following two separate, simultaneous
sets of events), but they haven't really tried attempted a big crossover since.
("Judgement Day" is maybe more a crossover in the sense that it's got
Johnny Alpha in it, although for the life of me I've never figured out what
he's doing in the story. Or why Brett Ewins drew one of its covers.)

As for
"momentism": yeah, that's true enough of "Judgement Day,"
but I think it's interesting that a lot of the really memorable character moments
of Dredd as a series overall--the ones that get callbacks later on--are either
things that happen in passing (Dredd interrogating De Gaulle, DeMarco kissing
him) or things that happen to other characters (the revelation of Rico's face, Chopper
being led away while everyone shouts his name). For all the times Dredd's had "I AM THE LAW!" stuck in a word balloon, I don't think there's ever been
a particularly notable bring-up-the-Hans-Zimmer-music one, and thank heaven for that. "Gaze into the fist
of Dredd!" is as close as it gets, and nobody's going back to that well.

True enough
that Dredd's always been a view of America from abroad--although you could say
as much for a lot of post-British Invasion American mainstream comics writing,
from Watchmen on down through
Morrison and Ellis and Gaiman and so on. (I'm trying to imagine how an American
writing something along the lines of "Whatever happened to the British
dream? You're looking at it" would come off.) One of the things that makes
Dredd particularly interesting to me, though, is that it's a view of America
from the British Isles and for a
British audience. Which is why the American cultural references in Dredd always surprise me a little, e.g.
Ennis calling his Referendum story "Twilight's Last Gleaming,"
roughly the equivalent of calling a story to be published in the U.S.
"Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks." Cf. Alan Moore joking that "we
had to put up with those references to Benedict Arnold in Superboy without knowing who he was." That's also another
point of difference with regard to Ennis's Dan
Dare: Dare is, more than any other comics character of his kind and
caliber, British to the core. Of course, Ennis is Northern Irish, which puts
yet another spin on it. But you're better equipped to talk about where Dredd
sits within Ennis's body of work than I am...

JOE: “Nobody's going back to
that well.” A rare sentiment these days, Douglas. It reminds me of "Helter
Skelter," which we’ve mentioned a few times; Ennis did that story as a
mature writer, as a means of dealing with his past, but not just on the page;
part of the deal was that he (and I presume artist John McCrea) would get
the rights to his (their) very first comic, the literary comic, "Troubled
Souls," if Ennis agreed to return to Mega-City One. I suspect he may have
done it to ensure the legalities remained in order for his and McCrea’s comedy
series Dicks -- since the lead
characters there had first appeared in "Troubled Souls" -- and,
possibly, also to give his debutante work a proper burial, a la Chris Ware and Floyd Farland: Citizen of the Future. BOOM!
BOOKEND!

That’s the funny thing
about 2000 AD and its sibling magazines - sometimes people do get their stuff
back. I know Rian Hughes has a Tales From
Beyond Science collection out next month from Image, and his Yesterday’s Tomorrows collection has "Really
& Truly" copyright him and Grant Morrison, while the Case Files 17, Judge Dredd and all
related characters and their distinctive likenesses and etc. are copyright
Rebellion A/S. For a while, that was the purportedly the lynchpin of Alan Moore
refusing to write any more of The Ballad
of Halo Jones, even above the protests of artist Ian Gibson: he wanted the
rights to the series, though he’s more recently indicated that he’s no longer
interested, much like how he (supposedly) turned down the rights to Watchmen-the-book when DC (allegedly)
slapped ‘em on the table in an effort to secure permanent spin-off rights for
unlimited sweet prequel action.

Obviously, they didn’t
need clearance at all -- just like 2000
AD can theoretically hire anybody on god’s green earth to crap out Halo
Jones IV -- though I’m unaware as to the legalities surrounding the presumably
still-active reversion language in the initial Watchmen agreement. Didn’t stop ‘em from attracting some
high-profile teams. Perhaps the situation can be dramatized via a rival bit of
work-for-hire, here from Chuck Dixon and the late, great John Hicklenton:

Call it a recessional
hymn. Partly because it’s soaring and over-dramatic; I can very much imagine
how all manner of highly skilled creative folks might participate in Before Watchmen, because they might well
have spouses and children and circumstances critically predicated on money, and
I rather think there would be money, lots of money, money in extraordinary
quantities, as much as one might read the whole situation as DC’s cutting their
silver with heavier metals. Shit, I can even imagine some of these comics being
good, despite their covers looking like the product of a creative community
that’s decided Watchmen was really all about bad-ass heroes, crazy-ass villains and rude-ass titties; who needs haunting symbolic
overtures when you’ve got the Comedian doing his best “this is my face while
I’m fucking you in the ass” routine? Yet... I mean, Brian Azzarello wrote Doctor 13; I can’t imagine one of his
series won’t carry some metaphoric charge, whether it be to criticize Alan
Moore, or DC, or just maybe track the Ditkovian hero’s progress from, say,
Rorschach being like Spider-Man in issue #1, then the early Question in issue
#2, then Mr. A in issue #3 and so on.

That’s aesthetics though. There’s
an ethical component too, if maybe not a broadly persuasive one. Business-wise,
you're always going to have a hard time convincing Americans that something is
wrong if it's not against the law, and I don't think it's ultimately a
convincing argument to very many people that you shouldn't work on a
company-owned superhero comic if one of the principals says 'don't do it' and
the other one's basically going 'have a goddamned blast,' and in doing so
you're **probably** once again delaying the return of their contractually
assured property to them -- which we might guess involved more than simply the
return of the reprint rights to Watchmen-the-book, since otherwise why would DC
offer that shit to Moore in the first place to guarantee the prequels? -- even
though it's not a black letter statutory violation of the sort that would win
you 25 in the Iso-Cube. But, you know, neither was DC not paying a stipend to
Siegel & Shuster for a long time; they were persuaded by the community into
doing that under the threat of their Superman movies becoming toxic from bad
publicity. Alan Moore, in contrast, is low-hanging fruit with fans and some
professionals alike; the bombs'll really go off if DC starts seriously fucking
with Neil Gaiman, instead of just declining to pay him commiserate with prose
publishing, which is how the Sandman 30th Anniversary project got scuttled a few
years back.

But it's a slippery
situation, this, because remember when I told you fans don’t really know who
the Punisher’s creators are? Part of that’s because they weren’t credited in
the issue from where I ripped the above image. Somebody PLEASE correct me if
I’m wrong here, but I don’t think they were credited in any of Ennis’ Punisher
comics. I don’t know about the royalty situation concerning movies or anything,
but I’m thinking they’re not making money off of miscellaneous appearances by
the character. So, much in the way that Alan Moore is arguably guilty of
Internet Sin #1: Hypocrisy in putting Voldemort in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, one could also say that Garth
Ennis is complicit in the systemic abuse of superhero comic book creators by
simply electing to work on a corporate-owned superhero character, though
admittedly that would make Gerry Conway guilty of the same in debuting the
Punisher in The Amazing Spider-Man. And
anyway, if "creator rights," as it appears to have been redefined
this week, means refusing to trample on the rights of any creator (of scripting
or art content) to follow their legally unprohibited bliss (although the
publisher, of course, will be the legal creator in a work-for-hire context),
then really there's no way not to oppose creator rights short of keeping your
damn mouth shut or everyone being replaced by literal script and art droids.

It's all very funny to me,
because I think Garth Ennis has lived a pretty laudatory professional life. I
really do think he's conducted himself very ethically in traversing the comic
book landscape. I find him admirable. Yet he's also had to make decisions
pursuant to living a life in serialized comics, because there isn't much a
serialization apparatus anymore that both pays steadily and lets you publish
what you want, and I get the feeling from his interviews that Ennis probably
would just rather write comics he and an artist create themselves when at all
possible. But even with something like The
Boys, Ennis has readily admitted to a certain "if you can't beat 'em,
join 'em" impulse behind it; I'm enough of an Ennis tragic that I own the
dvd for Stitched, this awful
17-minute horror movie he wrote and directed, but there's a nice hour-long
bonus interview on the disc about his career, and on there he very candidly
describes looking for a way to do a monthly superhero comic his way, and I'd
expect that's because even as far back as 2005, 2006, the writing was on the
wall about how poorly any 'mainstream' comic book writer's creator-owned
miniseries work would sell without the juicy superhero hooks that Mark Millar
could bring, let alone a very longform, 60- 70- 80-chapter monthly serial. And
that started at Wildstorm, at DC, and Ennis and Darick Robertson wound up getting
the rights to that back from whatever creator participation deal was in effect
after the first few issues. Because maybe he'd behaved well with them, and done
well for them, and maybe they couldn't figure out a way to get it to work
without him, because their objections to it were almost philosophical, and it
hadn't made Watchmen money. Who's to
say? I just think Ennis conducted himself as well by him as he did by them.

And while Ennis also says
on the Stitched dvd that his writing
finally clicked into place on Hellblazer
because he'd stopped smoking pot and, more pertinently, had gotten all the
"garbage" writing out of his system, I wonder if there wasn't
something deeper to his 20th Dredd century than just providing a public school
in which to make mistakes and experiment with his personal obsessions. I wonder
if this isn't a document of a young man learning the ways of the world, of
hooking up for the first time in a professional capacity with a property he
sincerely loves and seeing, feeling, understanding the presence of its creators
and people rather than abstractions, of accepting ideas from the original
writer and developing a fruitful, happy relationship with the original artist,
and then taking that experience to the wider world of superhero abstraction.

Because while I love some
superhero comics, Douglas, the American system, the structure, is not built to
flatter creators. Rather, it's built so that the appeal of superheroes, big
superheroes, shared-universe superheroes, is in the windows each issue form
onto the alternate, virtual realities of the Marvel and DC universes. To
nurture the continued function of those universes, artists are always less
necessary than writers and editors, but in the end individual writers and
editors are less necessary than an assurance that new hands can learn to
function. Because voices are 'best' here when they sink into characters. Some
writers, like Grant Morrison -- conspicuously, I must say for the record, the
only DC pro at this time to publicly tell the Before Watchmen offer to
fuck off to hell -- nonetheless enjoy this structure, though I think for many
it still carries the odor of exploitation, of dehumanzation, of suffocated
pleas for help, a cape of souls and faces.

To read Garth Ennis
Comics, to hear his voice no matter what, does risk repetition. But to know
you’ll always see a Garth Ennis Comic, regardless of structure, is to blunt
that dread impact that crucial little bit.

“Kill Superheroes !!! Tell
your own dreams.”

- Alejandro Jodorowsky

***

Thanks again to Joe! Next week, Graeme McMillan
returns to this site for a discussion of the first collection of the most
memorable series that launched in Megazine
vol. 2's early days: Devlin Waugh:
Swimming in Blood.

About Me

I write about pop music and comic books for a lot of places. My book "Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean" was published by Da Capo in 2007; my book "Live at the Apollo" was published by Continuum in 2004.